Dressmaker creates dream gowns for Mormons - sleeves included

They're as uncomfortable talking about their underwear as they are wearing their underwear.

A symbol of their faith, the to-the-knee, sleeved underwear is bunchy and billowy and decidedly not modern.

But eventually it must be discussed because they don the church-designed underwear every day. And while they sleep. And on special occasions - even on their wedding day. And to the anguish of Mormon brides, most wedding dresses don't come with sleeves.

Suzanne Novak watches the brides as they sift through the racks of silk and chiffon in her Gilbert bridal shop, their hope dwindling as they try on dress after impossible dress. She watches them fall in love with ivory strapless lace, with sleeveless satin and rhinestones, with spaghetti straps of all sorts, some crafted entirely out of beads.

Novak, owner of Suzanne's Bridal Boutique, sees the corners of their mouths drop when they find the small rack of dresses they can wear tucked away in the back of her shop: high-necked, high-backed, sleeves to the elbows. Dowdy and Matronly Row, Novak says. The dresses all look alike, very '80s prom, deeply Cinderella chic.

But brides today don't want to look like Cinderella, Novak says. They want to look like Heidi Klum.

Novak is the sleeve goddess of Gilbert. Her name is whispered among Mormon brides as a miracle worker, a seamstress divine, who can conjure fabric from the ether and turn a trendy strapless dress into a gown both modern and Mormon-approved. She sews sleeves on almost 200 wedding dresses a year, about a third of the dresses she sells.

She sits in the back room of her sunny Gilbert shop for up to 14 hours a day, sewing barefoot, a collection of pens stuck through the graying dark bun piled on top of her head. She is 56 and Hawaiian. She feeds the strip-mall cat, has been known to fetch her UPS man lunch and will bead sleeves until her eyes are blurry to make her brides happy. She loves almost all of them - "Sometimes, we get a stinker," she says - and they love her.

Novak can fix anything. She knows how to drape chiffon just so around the shoulders, how to turn tank-style tops into elbow sleeves. She orders fabric from the dress manufacturers to get the match just right. She can craft white bodysuits to wear beneath tulle and plays patchwork with lace. She folds damask into sleeves so intricate it's impossible to believe they weren't there before.

She has brides try on sleeve templates, just to catch the vision. Then she draws the imaginary gown, sticks her pen in her bun and heads to the workroom to bring it to life.

Bodice wrangling

As a Christian, Novak has never worn Mormon underwear, but she has the contours down pat. The sleeves on women's underwear measure 5inches from the tip of the collarbone downthe arm, the lace-trimmed V-neck hits just at the top of the decolletage and the shorts go to the knee.

The guys have it easier: Their underwear looks like a T-shirt and boxers, only longer, and a tuxedo disguises all. The ladies must wear their underwear beneath pantyhose and even bras, and they scour malls for clothes to cover them, hoisting up low-rise jeans, bemoaning every tank top in sight.

The underwear comes in fabrics such as cotton, nylon and polyester. Some, Novak says, work better than others.

"Honey, you're wearing the wrong ones," Novak tells 20-year-old bride Afton McAferty one evening. McAferty had fallen in love with a gown with spaghetti straps, and her friends had shared the legend of Novak: She won't ask you to explain the underwear; she'll just work around it.

"The cotton is all bunchy, and that's why you can't move your arms," says Novak, who cut the bodice off McAferty's dress and started over. "Try the silky ones next time you come, OK? They fit a little closer to the body."

Sometimes, Novak will put sleeves on a gown and watch a Mormon bride get a little wistful.

"They fell in love with the dress the way it was for a reason," she says. It's hard for them, sometimes, to resist the gowns they see on everyone else, say, the strapless Ariana with the whipped-cream bottom. Sometimes, Novak says, "It depends on whether the mother's with them or not" - a bride might wish out loud that she could wear a strapless dress.

She admires their dedication to their faith and the underwear that it implies.

"They know they have to deal with it," Novak says, "and they do."

Promises and princesses

The "garments," as they call the underwear, are among the most sacred traditions held by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons. When faithful church members reach adulthood, they are eligible to attend Mormon temples, a building separate from regular church meeting houses. Inside, weddings and other sacred covenants take place. After members attend the temple for the first time, the underwear is worn every day as a reminder of the covenants made within.

The official church statement on garments goes like this: "Garments are worn beneath street clothing as a personal and private reminder of commitments to God. Garments are considered sacred by Church members and are not regarded as a topic for casual conversation."

The underwear hasn't evolved much in silhouette since 1979, but wedding dresses have.

The '80s were good to Mormon brides: the days of puffed sleeves, Dallas and Princess Diana. The '90s were harder, when less became more, when Vera Wang and Calvin Klein put lace and beads upon skewers, and brides wanted the slinky sleeveless gown of Carolyn Bessette Kennedy.

Now, the bridal trends are just plain Mormon torture: strapless, sleeveless, backless, cut-to-there, even see-through tummies. Brides want red carpet, not castle. In the latest issue of Martha Stewart Weddings, there are 154 dresses. Three of them would cover Mormon underwear.

Novak thinks about this a lot. She calls manufacturers and begs them to stop sending such Disney-like dresses.

"No one wants 'em. Just because you want to be modest and covered up doesn't mean you want dowdy and matronly," Novak says. "They want to look pretty."

I feel pretty

It's not so hard, Novak thinks, to pacify this one little corner of the female psyche. You listen. You linger. You invoke the word "beautiful" as many times as necessary. You watch their faces for the moment when it clicks, when they feel pretty, too.

She has been calming the addled panic of dress-seeking females for more than 30 years, outfitting eight years of Miss Arizonas, spending decades in Valley bridal shops. For the past seven years, she has presided over her own, where the motto is "happy brides." She has always loved weddings.

She grew up poor, she says.

"We didn't have dolls. We didn't have toys," she says. "My mom says now I'm just playing with my life-sized dolls."

She just married off her only daughter, and while she sews and beads at her shop, she plays mom to the pack of young salesgirls who flit about. ("What did I tell you about marriage and compromise?" she tells them. "You're the woman. You're going to be making a lot of compromises. It's usually us.")

But a wedding dress, Novak thinks, should be sacrosanct from compromise. She thinks she can fix this, too. Sometimes, Novak daydreams about designing her own line of Mormon-friendly gowns: pre-sleeved, but glamorous, too. There's a market for it: More than 361,800 Mormons live in Arizona.

Today is Emily Streeter's last fitting. She's wearing a lacy strapless gown that Novak nipped into a mermaid style to show off Streeter's tiny physique. The dress started strapless but now boasts sequined lace sleeves, a high Victorian collar and a long row of tiny buttons down the back.

"I feel magic," says Streeter, 22, of Tempe.

"Your fingers are magic, Suzanne," a salesgirl whispers.

Novak beams.

"Suzanne reminds me of, like, an aunt - an aunt that takes care of you," says Streeter, who doesn't want to take her dress off. She can't wait to show her sister.

"My sister can't believe I want to cover up," Streeter says. But hard as they are to dress around, the Mormon underwear has its bonus, she says. Streeter watched her sister wrestle with her own wedding dress on the big day. She did not marry in the temple and was in full strapless regalia, yanking, tugging and wiggling all day to keep her dress up where it belonged. The sleeves Novak added to Streeter's gown will knock out all such nonsense.

"The temple is a really sacred place to me, so it's important to wear what's appropriate," Streeter says. "When you're going, you want to be able to be focused on feeling (God's) spirit, and not, say, falling out of your dress."